SWNOVELS Empire of the Summer Moon: Chapter 20
THE RESERVATION WAS a shattering experience. It was bad enough that the Comanches, having bent to the white man’s will, had to line up meekly to receive his beneficence. Like small, helpless children they were now unable to feed or clothe themselves. But as usual—to layer nightmare upon nightmare—much of this desperately needed welfare never came. The system was both cruel and humiliating: The taibos had taken away everything that had defined Comanche existence and offered nothing but crude squalor in its place. From the moment the People arrived, there was only a great yawning void of hunger and desperation and dependency. There was no way out and no way back.¹
The white man’s charity came in two forms: food rations and annuities. The latter consisted of $30,000 worth of goods each year for the combined Comanche and Kiowa tribes. Divided by three thousand residents, that meant $10 per person. The goods included axes, frying pans, thimbles, tin plates, butcher knives, and basic clothing. A lot of it was shoddy, if not completely worthless. The Comanches usually sold it cheap to white men. The beef ration of 1.5 pounds per person per day, on which the Indians mainly survived, turned out to be a bureaucratic and logistical disaster. The beef was issued on the hoof, and the government’s assumption was that an animal would produce edible food in the amount of 50 percent of its weight. This was a fine notion in a wet, fertile season when there was plenty of grass. But in winter many of the range-fed cattle lost so much weight that many had value only as hides. Since the reservation’s game was nearly hunted out, and the buffalo rarely came into range, and the nonbeef components of the ration (flour, coffee, sugar, salt) were less than half of what a soldier got—when they came at all—many families went hungry. The weekly issue did at least provide a diversion, if a pathetic one. The ration cows would be released from their pens, and then the Comanche warriors, whooping and yelling, would run them down and kill them with bows, arrows, and pistols.²
Strange, then, that this despondent, crippled, post-cataclysmic world became the staging ground for the remarkable career of Quanah Parker, as he would insist on being called, the man who became the most successful and influential Native American of the late nineteenth century and the first and only man ever to hold the title Principal Chief of the Comanches. His rise was doubly strange since he had been the hardest of the hard cases, the last holdout of the last band of the fanatical Quahadis, the only band of any tribe in North America that had never signed a treaty with the white man. At the time of his surrender he was twenty-seven years old. He was known as a fierce and charismatic warrior, a true killer, probably the toughest of his generation of Comanches, which was saying something. He had killed many Indians and white people in his short life, a statistic that will remain forever unknown because in the reservation years he quite intelligently refused to address the subject. He had led his own band in the wilderness after his elopement with Weckeah and was famous for having done so; along with Isa-tai he was the most prominent and the fastest rising of the young war chiefs. His surrender to Mackenzie in June 1875 ended such traditional career prospects forever.
But it also marked the beginning of something. His attitude toward his captivity had completely changed by the time he arrived at Fort Sill.³ He would take the white man’s road. He would leave the glories of the free life on the plains behind and he would not look back. Just as important, he would strive to lead his often recalcitrant, retrogressive tribe down that road. That meant the white man’s farming and ranching, white man’s schools for the children, white man’s commerce and politics and language. The void that loomed before the pitiable remnant of the Comanches was for Quanah Parker a grand opportunity. He would remake himself as a prosperous, tax-paying citizen of the United States of America who dressed in wool suits and Stetson hats and attended school board meetings. And he would try to haul the rest of the Comanche nation along with him. In the dreary, hopeless winter of 1875–76, the notion of bourgeois citizen-Comanches was just short of ridiculous; no one would have wanted it anyway. But Quanah saw the future clearly. On the high and wild plains he had been a fighter of jaw-dropping aggressiveness; now he would move just as resolutely from the life of a late Stone Age barbarian into the mainstream of industrial American culture.
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Quanah arrived on the harsh shores of the American nation like many other immigrants: in abject poverty. When he reached Fort Sill he had two wives, a daughter, a degree of standing in the tribe, and little more. He was a ration-drawer like everyone else, living in a tipi near the agency, waiting patiently in long lines for food. Whatever wealth he had possessed in the way of horseflesh was gone. Killing or dispersing Comanche horse herds was an integral part of the whites’ economic and military destruction of the Comanche tribe. In both white and Comanche terms, he was destitute.
Quanah was, moreover, only one of a number of chiefs with a claim on band or tribal leadership. There were older leaders like Horseback (Nokoni), Milky Way (Penateka), Shaking Hand (Kotsoteka), Wild Horse (Quahadi), and most especially Hears the Sunrise (Yamparika), all of whom wielded more influence than he did. But he was undeterred. From his first days on the reservation he plotted to advance himself and was not shy about it. Perhaps he had discovered something about his true nature in the days when he and Isa-tai had recruited Indians from five tribes to attack the buffalo hunters, a feat unprecedented in plains history, and one that caused him to be deferred to even by such great chiefs as the Kiowas’ Lone Wolf. Up until that disastrous first morning at Adobe Walls, when Isa-tai’s magic failed and the buffalo guns roared, they had been stunningly successful.
Quanah understood that the way to power was through the white man and his power to designate and appoint leaders, as it was for the native populations in nineteenth-century British colonies in Malaysia, India, and elsewhere. Thus he cultivated both the Indian agent, the Quaker J. M. Haworth, and the army commander, who from April 1, 1875, until 1877 was the irascible and brutally competent Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. Mackenzie had been surprised to learn of his parentage, and had taken some trouble, starting with his May 19 letter, to find out what had happened to his mother and sister. In one of their early meetings, Mackenzie told Quanah what he had learned, thus shattering Quanah’s immemorial dreams of a reunion with his beloved mother.
Still, Quanah had a fierce curiosity about his white family and continued to write, which meant having someone else write, letters seeking information. (Throughout the reservation years, Quanah’s apparent level of literacy varied with the educational level of whomever he got to write for him; he sounds alternately like a hillbilly, a pidgin-speaking Indian, and an English professor.) Evidence of his blossoming relationship with his new friend Mackenzie was a letter Mackenzie wrote on Quanah’s behalf to Cynthia Ann’s eighty-two-year-old uncle Isaac Parker in Fort Worth. In it, he explained to Isaac that Quanah was upset that the Parkers were apparently refusing to acknowledge him as a member of their family, and argued that Quanah “certainly should not be held responsible for the sins of a former generation of Comanches, and is a man whom it is worth trying to do something with.”⁴ Isaac never replied. The two men met on many other occasions. They lived for a while in close proximity to each other—Quanah in his tipi and Mackenzie in the row of houses that constituted the Fort Sill officers’ quarters. Quanah later told Charles Goodnight, after Goodnight complimented him on his manners, that it had been Mackenzie who had taken the time to teach him about white ways.⁵ This suggested that the two men spent significant time together. It would have been something to watch the etiquette lessons given by America’s greatest Indian fighter to the man who would turn out to be the last Comanche chief.
In a world of sullen, dispossessed Indians, camped disconsolately in tipis in the grassy, rolling hills and stream bottoms around Fort Sill, Quanah made a point of being cheerful, helpful, and cooperative. That was his nature anyway. He was naturally gregarious, the product of an intensely communal society where consensus-building was the most valued political skill and the particular skill that he possessed in abundance. A young war chief’s standing was based entirely on his ability to recruit warriors to go along with him on raids and military expeditions. Recruitment and consensus was what the Adobe Walls campaign was all about. Quanah volunteered to bring back several Comanches who had left the reservation to hunt buffalo. He also brought in a brave who was charged with murdering a soldier.⁶
His approach soon paid off. When agent Haworth divided up the tribes into “beef bands” in order to streamline the rationing process, he appointed leaders of each band, and by 1878, Quanah had been named head of the third-largest band. Thus, like a ward boss in Chicago of a later day, he controlled the distribution of goods, and obviously guaranteed his own take. This was his first taste of power in the new political order, and it did not come without consequences. Some of the Comanche leaders despised him and his favored status with the taibos. They would force him to fight for whatever power he got for virtually his whole life on the reservation.
Just as important for the new politics of captivity, Quanah agreed to go on a special mission for his new friend Mackenzie. His task: to track down and bring back a small group of renegade Comanches and their families who remained outside the reservation. In July 1877, Quanah set out to find them with two older Comanche men, three women, and several government pack mules loaded with supplies. He carried a white flag and a stern letter from Colonel Mackenzie on army letterhead detailing Quanah’s mission and promising severe consequences for anyone who interfered with it. Still, it was an extremely dangerous undertaking. The land to the west of Fort Sill was loaded with buffalo hunters and other cold-eyed men in the hide business who sought revenge on Indians in general and specifically on Comanches. A lightly armed party of six consisting mostly of old men and women would have been easy prey. That Quanah, until his surrender one of the most arrogant warriors of the plains and at the height of his physical prowess, would undertake such a bloodless diplomatic mission with women as his outriders was extraordinary. It showed just how much he had changed his thinking. Or perhaps it showed how much he wanted to impress his new bosses.
Quanah and his party headed westward across the rolling plains, climbed the caprock, and crossed the dead-flat grasslands of the high plains under the scorching summer sun. Near the Texas–New Mexico border he encountered a unit of forty black soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry under Captain Nicholas Nolan, a white man. They were looking for the same group of runaway Comanches, who had apparently attacked some buffalo hunters. The bluecoats were anticipating considerable glory when they caught the renegades and were thus unhappy when they learned of Quanah’s commission and of Colonel Mackenzie’s plan to give the criminal Indians a free pass back to Fort Sill.⁷ Quanah told Nolan that he knew where the Indians were and that he was heading southeast to find them. This was a bald-faced lie, and had its intended effect. Nolan’s troops took off in hot pursuit, in the wrong direction. In their haste they also neglected to provision themselves adequately for a trip across the plains in high summer. They soon ran out of water. The men were forced to drink their own and their horses’ urine, mixing it with sugar to make it more palatable. They killed and drank the blood of two of their horses. They somehow survived.⁸ They never found anybody.
Quanah had no such trouble, either with the searing heat and bone-dry land or in locating the runaway Indians. He found them camped on the Pecos River and met with the men in council over four days, laboring to convince them that they had to give up their lives on the open plains. “Quanah told us that it was useless for us to fight longer, for the white people would kill us all if we kept on fighting,” wrote Herman Lehmann, a former captive who had become a full-fledged, battle-hardened Comanche warrior and who was among the renegades. “If we went on the reservation the Great White Father at Washington would feed us, and give us homes, and we would in time become like the white man, with lots of good horses and cattle, and pretty things to wear.” This may sound disingenuous: Quanah knew as well as anyone what life on the reservation was like. But there is no reason to doubt his hope or his optimism. His entire career was based on his peculiarly sunny view of the future. He always genuinely believed things would get better, if he could only convince his people to change their old ways. Persuasive as always, and with unmatched credentials as a killer of white men, Quanah won the renegades over. Then he escorted them to their new home, a distance of two hundred fifty miles as the crow flies, across the same potentially lethal plains. Now, of course, his band was far more numerous and therefore much more visible. Quanah took no chances. He traveled by night. He abandoned three hundred horses. There were still several tense encounters with whites, but according to Lehmann, Quanah, speaking broken English, somehow managed to talk his way through.⁹
On August 20, Quanah brought fifty-seven Indians (probably no more than fifteen fighting men) and one white captive (Lehmann) into the reservation.¹⁰ When Lehmann first saw the bluecoats approaching, he panicked. “I was riding a black mare and a pretty swift horse,” he wrote in a memoir. “So I turned and rode for life back toward the Wichita Mountains.” But as a horseman he was no match for Quanah, who rode him down after four miles and gently persuaded him to return.¹¹ (Lehmann, who was seventeen at the time, lived with Quanah and his family for three years and considered him his foster father. He was sent back to his mother in 1880.)¹² Mackenzie was impressed that Quanah had been able to get everyone home without bloodshed, and praised the young chief’s “excellent conduct in a dangerous expedition.” Leveraging this goodwill—something he was quite good at—Quanah persuaded Mackenzie and Haworth that the renegades should not be sent off to prison in Fort Leavenworth. For that he also earned the gratitude of his tribe.
He won even more political points when he successfully opposed the government’s plan to merge the Kiowa-Comanche agency with the Wichita agency, which would have meant a fifty-mile trek for some Comanches just to draw rations. By 1880 he had become the acknowledged leader of the Quahadis and the Indian leader most often consulted by the agent.¹³
For all of his cooperation with the white man, however, and his commitment to the new road, Quanah was not yet quite ready to put aside all dreams of the old life. He and others lobbied hard for permission to go on a buffalo hunt. It is not clear whether this was to be one last buffalo hunt or merely the first of several, but in March 1878 a group of Comanches and Kiowas, including some women and children, were finally allowed to go out, unsupervised, on a hunt. This was cause for great excitement among the Indians. Perhaps it was the simple urge to validate their own past, or maybe a desire to show their children who they really were. They would ride out again into the great oceanic emptiness that so terrified the taibos. They would kill and eat, and use the gallbladder to salt the raw bloody liver, and drink the warm milk from the udders mixed with blood, and it would be, however briefly, like the old days. They rode west from Fort Sill toward the high plains, full of dreams and nostalgia. They understood that the hide hunters had taken a terrible toll on the buffalo. But they had never doubted that there were herds left to hunt.
What they found shocked them. There were no buffalo anywhere, no living ones, anyway, only vast numbers of stinking, decaying corpses or bones bleached white by the sun. The idea of traveling a hundred miles and not seeing a buffalo was unimaginable. It had not been true at the time of their surrender. Disappointed—perhaps heartbroken might be a better word—Quanah and his cohort pushed deeper into the Texas Panhandle, certainly well beyond where the army and Indian agents had intended them to go. He led them back to the old Quahadi sanctuary, the magnificent rock battlements of Palo Duro Canyon in the upper Texas Panhandle, which had once teemed with bison herds. This, too, was an emotional moment. Most of them, who knew it affectionately as Prairie Dog, had never expected to see it again.
Nor had it ever occurred to them that a white man might now own the second-largest canyon in the West. But in the three years since the end of the Red River War an enterprising white man had in fact managed to acquire it. Charles Goodnight—the ranger who had tracked Peta Nocona to the Pease River in 1860 and had later tracked Quanah and his brother to those same canyon lands—was now the sole proprietor of the Palo Duro. He was already one of the more prominent ranchers in the state, having given his name to one of its main cattle highways, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, which he opened in 1866 to bring cattle to markets in New Mexico and Colorado.
On a bitter cold day, with snow on the ground, the Indians entered the canyon, and, still finding no buffalo, started killing Goodnight’s cattle. Goodnight rode out to meet them. The intruders were in an ugly mood, having just learned that their sacred canyons now “belonged” to someone else. They put Goodnight and an interpreter in the middle of a circle and asked him what he was doing there. “I am raising cattle,” he replied. They then asked, provocatively, did he not know that “the country was theirs.” He answered that he “had heard that they claimed the country but that the great captain of the Texans also claimed it.”¹⁴ A parley with Quanah followed. When Goodnight asked what his name was, he replied in his broken English: “Maybe so two names—Mr. Parker or Quanah.”¹⁵
Then Quanah asked Goodnight where he came from, a loaded question intended to elicit the answer that he was one of the hated Texans. Comanches always drew a sharp distinction between Texans and everyone else. Texan encroachment, after all, had ended their way of life. Goodnight lied and said he was from Colorado, whereupon the Indians tried to prove him wrong, grilling him about every prominent landmark and river in Colorado. Since he had pioneered the cattle trail to Denver and beyond, he was able to answer all their questions correctly. Satisfied that he was not a Tejano, Quanah said he was ready to make a treaty. “We’re ready to talk business,” said Quanah. “What have you got?” Goodnight answered: “I’ve got plenty of guns and bullets, good men and good shots, but I don’t want to fight unless you force me. You keep order and behave yourself and I will give you two beeves every other day until you find out where the buffaloes are.”¹⁶ Quanah agreed, and thus was a “treaty” made between the legendary Comanche chief and the rancher they called the Leopard Coat Man. (Two generations hence, Texas schoolchildren would be required to study this odd agreement.) Several days later, twenty-five black soldiers under a white lieutenant, who had been summoned by Goodnight, arrived to deal with the Indian threat. Goodnight assured them that the problem had been solved, and the Indians remained camped there another three weeks.
There was one incident where Quanah’s inveterate warrior instincts flashed briefly. It is worth noting because there is nothing else in his reservation life that remotely resembled this sequence of events; he really had left just about everything behind; the ill-fated hunt had just seemed like a reasonable idea, a modest gesture to placate people who had lost everything else. Comanches and Kiowas had long been uneasy about black troops, whom they called “buffalo soldiers” because their tight, curly hair reminded them of a buffalo’s ruff. They considered them bad medicine and were the only adversaries they would not scalp. After a fight had broken out between the soldiers and the Indians, Goodnight gathered Quanah and the army lieutenant to discuss the problem. The lieutenant told the interpreter that if the Indians did not settle down he would take their guns away. Quanah replied, in Spanish: “You can have the guns.” Then he pointed to some lodge poles and said “We will use those on the negroes.” The idea was: He would not waste any bullets on the buffalo soldiers, and he would not need anything but the poles to defeat them.¹⁷ This was the old, snarling Comanche arrogance, now consigned to making idle threats. Quanah was never known for it in the reservation years; perhaps this outburst was his last indulgence. He and his party returned to Fort Sill without ever finding a buffalo. Any lingering notions that they could return to their ancient ways, even momentarily, were now forever dispelled. The buffalo were all dead, and the white man owned the sacred canyons.
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What really changed Quanah’s life on the reservation was the cattle business, which by the late 1870s was transforming the entire western frontier. While the Indian wars raged, the Texas cattle industry, which had its origins in the Spanish missions of the mid-eighteenth century, had been steadily increasing in size. In 1830 there were an estimated 100,000 head of cattle in the state; by 1860 there were between four and five million.¹⁸ Though the Civil War temporarily arrested the industry’s development, by the latter 1860s the state was fairly bursting with beef in search of markets. The big northerly drives started in earnest in 1866, taking Texas cattle north to the railheads in Kansas, and grew geometrically with the surrender of the Comanches and Kiowas. Many of these cattle traveled along the Western Trail, which led through Fort Griffin and across the Red River and north to Dodge City. That trail happened to lead through the heart of the Comanche-Kiowa Reservation in Oklahoma.
Such intrusions were neither innocent nor coincidental. The cowboys would often linger on the reservation, sometimes for weeks, fattening thousands of their cattle on the lush grass that belonged to Indians. The contractors who supplied beef to the reservation also turned their animals out to graze on the Indian lands. None of this was legal, but there were no troops to police it. And many of the big ranchers south of the Red River, facing competition for grazing lands, now coveted the same reservation grass.
The Indians’ response to the white incursions was to form what amounted to protection rackets. Quanah was the first to figure out how to make them work. Groups of armed Comanches, not exactly war parties but not terribly friendly, either, patrolled the southern and western parts of their reservation looking for trespassing herds. A drover named Julian Gunter recalled encountering “a large band of Indians” who rode slowly around Gunter’s herd. Quanah, who led them, lectured him: “Your government gave this land to the Indian to be his hunting ground,” said Quanah. “But you go through and scare the game and your cattle eat the grass so the buffalo leaves and the Indian starves.” Sensing what was required, Gunter let Quanah’s braves cut six “fat cows” from the herd for themselves and went on his way.¹⁹ On another occasion a cattleman named G. W. Roberson was similarly forced by Quanah “to give him a beef.” Roberson explained: “We had to kind of stand in with those scoundrels. If you didn’t they come in at night and run your horses off or stampede your cattle. And most any man would rather give them a beef than have them run his cattle off.”²⁰ Some even reported that Quanah was charging fees in the form of a one-dollar tax per wagon and ten cents per head of stock.²¹ Once they had paid up, of course, the cattlemen enjoyed the protection of Quanah’s men while they crossed the reservation. That “protection” included advice on the best route to follow and on sources of water. Those who did not cooperate made payment in other ways: One outfit lost 295 head to the Comanches on a single drive. Nor was Quanah reluctant to play hardball politics inside the reservation. He was happy to report the Kiowas to the agent for taking cattle from herds heading north and assaulting cowboys while he himself managed to obtain official permission from the agent to practice what amounted to an identical form of blackmail.²²
But these were mere annoyances. The larger issue was whether or not the Indians should do what everybody else in America did: lease out their unused grazing lands. In this case, to white cattle outfits. This was a surprisingly controversial question, considering that the Indians were sitting on top of more than three thousand square miles of prime grazing land. Many Indians, including most of the Kiowas and a portion of the Comanches, thought it was a bad idea. They believed it would encourage white men to take over the land, jeopardizing the Indians’ future as stockmen. Such gratuitous income from “grass money,” moreover, would lead the young men to become lazy and gamble. The other side, represented by Quanah, saw it as a legitimate way for Indians to make money off what was happening anyway. The money could be used to build their own herds. There was plenty of land: Some two million acres were available, and thirty-five white cattle outfits were lining up for the privilege.
The question was hotly debated in a political fight that lasted from 1880 to 1884. Quanah soon emerged as the leader of the pro-leasing faction. He traveled several times to Washington to help build his case. In one of his audiences with the secretary of the interior, he dismissed the antileasers contemptuously, saying “I cannot tell what objection they have to it, unless they have not got sense. They are kind of old fogy, on the wild road yet, unless they have not got brains enough to sabe [sic] the advantage there is in it.” His rivals—Hears the Sunrise, Isa-tai, Lone Wolf, White Wolf, and many Kiowas—meanwhile, denounced Quanah as “bought by the cattlemen.”
They were at least partly right. Quanah had been put on the payroll at $35 a month by one of the leading cattle outfits. The cattlemen, who were rabid advocates of the leasing of Indian lands, saw him as their spokesman, a job he performed very well because he believed his tribe’s interests were the same as theirs. The white ranchers also very likely contributed to Quanah’s own growing herd of cattle, and paid for his trips to Washington to counterbalance the lobbying done in the nation’s capital by Hears the Sunrise and the antileasers, who repeatedly demanded that Quanah be stripped of his authority as a tribal leader.²³
On its face, Quanah’s arrangement with the stockmen might seem like simple corruption. But it could only be seen that way against standards that did not exist on the frontier. Quanah was merely playing the game the way everyone else did. Almost everyone who was a party to leasing talks had a substantial conflict of interest. Isa-tai, who opposed leasing, was actually running his own protection racket for two thousand head of cattle that grazed continuously on Indian land, as was Permansu, the nephew of the famous Comanche chief Ten Bears.²⁴ The Indian agent, the agency clerk, and other agency personnel all had received payments from cattlemen or had vested interests in the outcome. (The agent was eventually fired for his inside dealing.) Four other Comanches were also on the stockmen’s payroll, as were several “squaw men” (white men who had married Indian women) on the reservation. Bribes were being paid all around. This was the world in which Quanah was learning to operate: It was his introduction to how business was done in the rawboned American West of the latter nineteenth century, where corners were routinely cut and where conflicts of interest were the rule rather than the exception. Such behavior often resulted in the Indians being cheated or defrauded. No one ever cheated Quanah, as far as we know. He understood the game too well, and was always a step ahead of everyone else, including the white stockmen. He played by the rules as he perceived them to be, and he was as good as most white men at playing the game. He also truly believed that making money off the unused land was best for his tribe.
He was right. He won the fight outright in 1884, when Indians on the reservation voted to approve leasing. Rights to Indian grass were awarded to cattlemen who had been handpicked by him. When asked pointedly by the secretary of the interior whether he had been compensated, Quanah replied: “They have not paid me anything for the lease.” That was probably technically true: He was on the payroll long before the lease was negotiated. In the end the Indians got six cents per acre per year on a six-year lease. It was later increased to ten cents an acre. As part of the deal, the cattlemen also agreed to hire fifty-four Indians as cowboys, which could be seen as a form of patronage: Quanah taking care of his own.
After the leases were signed, Quanah worked even harder to establish himself as the principal chief of the Comanches, a title that had never before existed. In the history of the tribe there had been no need for centralized political power, or for a single spokesman of any kind. Now there was. He was appointed to serve as judge on the Court of Indian Offenses, a curious body that dispensed justice that was somewhere between English common law and Comanche tribal tradition. His growing political power was instrumental in preventing the Ghost Dance cult from spreading to Comanches and Kiowas—the same cult that led to the infamous massacre of Miniconjou Sioux at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890—for which he received notice in the national press. The Ghost Dance was driven by an apocalyptic vision of the return of dead Indians and the annihilation or disappearance of whites. Quanah, having witnessed the destructive power of Isa-tai’s grand visions at Adobe Walls, opposed it from the start and spoke against it. In a letter to the agent he stated: “I hear the koway [Kiowas] and shianis [Cheyennes] say that there are Indians come from heaven and want to take me and my People and go see to see them. But I tell them that I want my People to work and pay no attention to that. . . . We depend on the government to help us and no [sic] them.”²⁵
Meanwhile, his own business was prospering. He built up his own cattle herd by gifts from the cattlemen, by outright purchase, and by selective breeding until he was running nearly five hundred head. His new friend Charles Goodnight gave him a prime Durham bull for breeding. He became a supplier to his own people: In 1884 alone he sold forty head to the agency, making $400 on the transaction. He also came to control a pasture of forty-four thousand acres (sixty-nine square miles) that was soon known as the Quanah Pasture, some of which he leased out to cattlemen who paid him directly. He had a hundred-fifty-acre farm that was tended by a white man and two hundred hogs, three wagons, and one buggy.
A few years earlier, in 1886, something else had added to his growing celebrity: James DeShields published the first book about his mother, Cynthia Ann, which received wide circulation in the Southwest. Anyone who was not aware of Quanah’s origins now learned about them in minute detail. The book included Quanah’s photograph and a description of him that was both flattering and accurate.
Quanah speaks English, is considerably advanced in civilization, and owns a ranch with considerable livestock and a small farm; wears a citizen’s suit and conforms to the customs of civilization—withal a fine-looking and dignified son of the plains. . . . He is tall, muscular, as straight as an arrow; look-you-straight-through eyes, very dark skin, perfect teeth, and heavy, raven-black hair—the envy of feminine hearts. . . . He has a handsome carriage and drives a pair of matched grays.²⁶
This was the image—that of a prosperous burger—that Quanah increasingly sought to convey to the rest of the world. For all of his desire to walk the white man’s road, however, there were compromises he never made. He wore his hair long and plaited and never cut it. He kept his wives. He was once asked by the Indian commissioner why he refused to get rid of his surplus wives. Quanah replied:
A long time ago I lived free among the buffalo on the staked plains and had as many wives as I wanted, according to the laws of my people. I used to go to war in Texas and Mexico. You wanted me to stop fighting and sent messages all the time “You stop, Quanah.” You did not say then “How many wives you got, Quanah?” Now I come and sit down as you want. You talk about wives. Which one do I throw away? You, little girl, you go away, you got no Papa. You, little fellow, you go away. You pick him?²⁷
His crowning glory, and the thing he was most proud of, was the extraordinary house he built for himself in 1890. The story behind it is so purely Quanah, so revelatory of the man he was, that it is worth noting. While many others in his tribe had gotten government funding to build the typical $350 shotgun shacks that dotted the reservation, he had been content to live in a tipi, spending his summers outdoors in the traditional Comanche “brush arbor.” But by the late 1880s his status in the tribe was such that he needed something better. Something much better. What he wanted, once he had thought about it, was a ten-room, two-story clapboard house, the sort of grand and stately plains home that any white rancher would have been proud to own and that absolutely no reservation Indian had ever owned.
The problem was where to get the money. There were the stockmen, of course, Quanah’s old friends like Burk Burnett and Daniel Waggoner who could be counted on to help. Better still, there was the government, which surely owed him something. Even better than that was the ploy he eventually concocted. He sent his white tenant farmer and adoptive son, David Grantham,²⁸ to tell the agent that he wanted a subsidy and that if he did not get it “he will see the stock men and get the money,” a curious sort of threat but one that clearly hit its mark. Indian Agent Charles Adams applied to the Indian affairs office for $500 to help Quanah build his house, saying that “he is an Indian who deserves some assistance from the government.” He was turned down by Commissioner T. J. Morgan, a staunch Baptist who strongly disapproved of Quanah’s polygamy.
Quanah did not give up. He and Adams peppered Washington with more letters, even bypassing Morgan and appealing to his boss, the secretary of the interior. Quanah had almost every ranking person at Fort Sill sign his pleas, including the commandant. He argued that other polygamous Indians had received grants; that a lesser Penateka chief had received funds for a house; that he was being treated unfairly because of an ancient custom of his tribe. He would not agree to jettison his multiple wives, or offer any sort of compromise. This was the quintessential Quanah: hustling, demanding, always looking for an angle, always negotiating yet unwilling to compromise his own principles. Morgan never changed his mind. He wrote: “As it is against the policy of this office to encourage or in any way countenance polygamy, no assistance will be granted Parker in the erection of his house, unless he will agree, in writing, to make a choice among his wives and to live only with the one chosen and to fully provide for his other wives without living with them.”²⁹ Quanah of course refused.
So the privilege of helping to finance Quanah’s new home went to the stockmen, after all, mainly to Burk Burnett. They were happy to oblige, though it is not known how much they contributed. Quanah certainly had substantial resources of his own. In 1890, Quanah’s new house was finished. It was indeed a ten-room, two-story clapboard affair, and it cost more than $2,000. The interior was finished beaded board, with ten-foot ceilings. There was a formal, wallpapered dining room with a long table and a wood-burning stove. The house sat on a splendid piece of high ground in the shadow of the Wichita Mountains. He later added a wide, colonnaded two-story porch to it and painted enormous white stars on the roof. His home became known as Star House and still stands today, having been moved twice. One of the great, obscure treasures of the American West, it occupies the back lot of a defunct amusement park behind an Indian trading post in Cache, Oklahoma.
The scene at Quanah’s splendid new house had no precedent in Comanche history; it could have existed only in the weird half-world of the reservation. No one had ever seen anything like it. He had a total of eight wives (one of them was Weckeah, the woman with whom he had eloped), seven of whom he married during the reservation period. Between them he fathered twenty-four children, five of whom died in infancy. Photographs of his wives taken in the 1880s and 1890s reveal women who are strikingly attractive. Quanah liked women, and somehow managed to keep them even though he infuriated existing wives by constantly courting new ones.³⁰ In spite of Quanah’s arguments to the contrary, multiple wives no longer had a real place in the Comanche culture. Polygamy had been mainly a way of providing extra labor in tanning and processing buffalo. Those days were gone. Quanah had wives now simply because he wanted them and could afford them. His enormous family soon contained white members: two of Quanah’s daughters married white men. He adopted and raised two white boys of his own, one of whom he found in a circus in San Antonio and adopted on the spot.³¹ He had adopted Herman Lehmann for three years, and Lehmann was so fond of his Comanche family that in 1901 he applied for full status as a tribe member.³² One young white man, Dick Banks, showed up at Star House just because he wanted to meet Quanah; he was given a bed and invited to stay indefinitely.³³ Family members lived either at the house or in tipis in the front yard, which was surrounded by a white picket fence. Photographs from the era show the place with its double porches literally spilling over with people.
The remarkable scene consisted of more than just his own family. There were always many other Comanche tipis around the house, too. That was partly because of Quanah’s unfailing generosity—he fed many hungry Comanches over the years and never turned anyone away.³⁴ According to people who knew him, feeding members of his tribe was the main use to which he put his private herd. Many sick Comanches came there in order to receive prayers—often related to peyote ceremonies (on which more later)—or, sometimes, in the knowledge that Quanah would handle the funeral arrangements. Most were put in beds inside Star House, which meant that family members slept in the tipis.³⁵ His reputation as a healer drew white men as well, at least one of whom claimed to have been healed by him.³⁶
There was also a constant stream of guests, white and Indian, at his dining room, a formal place with wainscoted and wallpapered walls, a molded tin ceiling, and a dinner table that would seat twelve comfortably.³⁷ Quanah laid a splendid table. He hired white women to teach his wives how to cook, and for ten years employed a white servant, a Russian immigrant named Anna Gomez.³⁸ Over the years guests included General Nelson Miles, who had tracked him in the Red River War, his neighbor Geronimo, Kiowa chief Lone Wolf, Charles Goodnight, Commissioner of Indian Affairs R. G. Valentine, British ambassador Lord Brice, Isa-tai, Burk Burnett and Daniel Waggoner, and eventually President Teddy Roosevelt. Though Quanah always refused to talk about his days as a Comanche warrior, he loved to hold forth on tribal politics, or on his frequent trips to Washington. He loved jokes. He dined often with a family named Miller, and at one meal he stated that the white man had pushed the Indian off the land. When Mr. Miller asked how the whites had done this, Quanah told him to sit down on a cottonwood log in the yard. Quanah sat down close to him and said “Move over.“ Miller moved. Parker moved with him, and again sat down close to him. “Move over,” he repeated. This continued until Miller had fallen off the log. “Like that,” said Quanah.³⁹
By 1890, Quanah’s letterhead read “Quanah Parker: Principal Chief of the Comanches,” a title he had been permitted by the agent to use. There had never been such a person before in the history of the tribe. There would never be another. He still had rivals, including the perennial second-rater Isa-tai, but the reality, acknowledged by the white man as well as most Comanches, was that he was the main chief. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested in the early twentieth century, there are no second acts in American lives, then Quanah was an exception to the rule. The lives of most of his fellow tribe members, however, proved Fitzgerald’s thesis admirably. That year most Comanche adult males still lived in tipis, wore their hair long as in the prereservation days, spoke little or no English, preferred their medicine men to the white man’s doctors, dressed in buckskins and blankets, and continued to condemn agriculture as women’s work.
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While Quanah prospered, his friend Ranald Mackenzie’s life took an abrupt turn into sadness and tragedy. The change did not happen right away. During the years after the Red River War, Mackenzie was one of the most highly regarded officers in the U.S. Army. At Fort Sill he had further distinguished himself. As an administrator he may have been abrupt and easily angered, but he was also firm, fair, and just, and won the respect of Kiowas, Apaches, and Comanches alike. One particular story illustrates his stern and deliberate style of management. In 1876 a group of Comanches had illegally left the reservation, then had quietly returned. Mackenzie found out about it and ordered the chiefs to arrest the offenders. Instead of obeying, they showed up at his office wanting to parley. These were typical Indian tactics: parley, dither for an extended period of time, then find a compromise. Mackenzie listened patiently for half an hour to their harangue, while surreptitiously ordering his men to mount up and prepare for battle. He then rose from his desk, and calmly said, “If you do not bring in the renegades in twenty minutes, I will go to their camps and kill them all.” Then he left the room. The renegades were soon delivered.⁴⁰
Sheridan thought so well of Mackenzie that he sent him and his crack Fourth Cavalry veterans north following Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn in June 1876. Less than two months after Custer’s demise, Mackenzie assumed command of both the District of the Black Hills and Camp Robinson, the fort that guarded the Red Cloud Sioux Agency. When a large group of Sioux scoffed at Mackenzie’s order to return to the reservation, he promptly took eighteen companies and surrounded the Indian village at dawn. Two hundred thirty-nine men surrendered, along with 729 horses.
That winter he was placed in charge of another major campaign: the Powder River Expedition against the Northern Cheyennes and their chief Dull Knife, a group that had taken part in the destruction of Custer’s troops. In heavy snow and subzero conditions, Mackenzie with 818 soldiers and 363 Indian scouts attacked Dull Knife’s village at dawn on November 25, 1876. They routed the Indians, killing twenty-five and wounding many more and capturing five hundred horses with the loss of only six of his own. In April, Dull Knife, hearing Mackenzie was still after him, surrendered. “You are the one I was afraid of when you came here last summer,” he told Mackenzie. Two weeks later Crazy Horse and 889 Sioux surrendered to Mackenzie at the Red Cloud Agency, ending the Sioux and Cheyenne war.⁴¹ The surrender stands as a sort of bookend to the twinned fates of Custer and Mackenzie, the one destined for eternal fame and glory, the other for obscurity and oblivion.
Mackenzie became Sherman and Sheridan’s favorite commander in the West, as he had been Grant’s favorite young officer in the Civil War. He was the one they sent to deal with difficult situations. In 1877 he was called to the border to subdue bandits. In 1879 and 1881 he went to deal with rebellious Utes in Colorado, issuing an ultimatum to them that resembled the one the Comanches had received at Fort Sill—with equivalent success. He crushed an uprising of Apaches in New Mexico and was so successful in dealing with the Indians in general that the governor and citizens of the state lobbied for his promotion to brigadier general. With former president Grant’s enthusiastic help, he got the promotion in October 1881.
But by that time something was already terribly wrong with Ranald Slidell Mackenzie. Soon after his promotion he wrote a letter to his superiors with the odd request for reassignment to a military court or retiring board. The handwriting in the letter was so poor as to suggest that the writer had suffered a stroke. He wanted the soft duty, said the tough-as-nails Mackenzie, because he had suffered “much harder in the last two years than anyone has any idea of.”⁴² It was the first hint of the calamitous changes that were taking place inside his head.
He was nevertheless assigned to the command of the Department of Texas, based in San Antonio. There, at the age of forty-three, he began a rapid decline. Though he had forsworn alcohol throughout his career, he now began, unaccountably, to drink heavily. His eccentricities, notably his impatience and irritability, increased noticeably. For the first time anyone knew of, he began to keep the company of a lady, the thirty-four-year-old Florida Sharpe, with whom he had fallen in love in the late 1860s while on court-martial duty. (She had then been married to the base’s doctor.) On December 9, 1882, the army surgeon began treating Mackenzie for unusual behavior. On December 10 the quartermaster said that he thought Mackenzie was insane. A week later, General Mackenzie became engaged to Mrs. Sharpe, and it became known that he had purchased property in the nearby town of Boerne and had plans to retire there. On December 18 he drank too much and got into a fight with two local citizens. They had no idea who he was, so they beat him senseless and tied him to a cart where he was found the next day. Several days later he was loaded onto a train under the pretext that Sheridan had something important to speak with him about in Washington. On December 29 he was checked in to the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York City. On March 5, an army retiring board declared, over his protests, that he was insane and therefore not fit for duty.
The rest of his life was a steady descent into madness. He remained in the asylum until June, still protesting his forced retirement, when he went to live with his sister at his boyhood home in Morristown, New Jersey. He had plans to revisit Texas and his property in Boerne, but he never moved again. Mrs. Sharpe never spoke of him. His physical and mental health deteriorated; he grew more and more childish until he could no longer make himself understood. He died in a New York hospital on January 18, 1889, at the age of forty-eight.
What caused Mackenzie’s madness? There are several theories. For many years it was thought that his condition was the result of syphilis. But this is unlikely. The army knew all about syphilis, dealt with it constantly, and there is no record of Mackenzie ever being treated for it. One historian suggested that his illness was the result of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that was unknown at the time. Mackenzie’s horrific wounds and central role in many Civil War battles certainly could have produced it, and his irritability, explosive temper, and difficulty forming close relationships are common symptoms. He had also suffered an odd accident back in 1875. In the autumn of that year, he somehow fell off a cart at Fort Sill and injured his head so badly that he was in a stupor for three days. It was said that he became unusually irritable in the days that followed. Finally, there is the more remote possibility that the sunstroke he had suffered as a child had something to do with it. We will never know. His death went virtually unnoticed. Quanah, who was forty at the time, making his way in the new, civilized West that Mackenzie had made possible, must have heard about it, though there is no record of his reaction. The day after Mackenzie’s death the following death notice appeared on the obituary page of the New York Times:
MACKENZIE—At New Brighton, Staten Island, on the 19th of January, Brig. Gen. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, United States Army, in the 48th year of his age.
In its brevity and lack of detail, the item suggested a minor military figure, perhaps someone who had won a medal or two in the war, and had then been put out to grass in some lonely outpost of the new empire. There was no news item in the Times or any other newspapers with the particulars of his life. The event would have seemed to have no more significance to the casual reader than the passing of a manager in a local dry goods company.